One Good Turner Deserves Another
Still right after all these years: "The war in Afghanistan is nearly nine years old—the longest in American history. After the U.S. quickly toppled the Taliban regime in October 2001, the Taliban, by all accounts, came back stronger and harsher enough to control now at least 30 percent of the country. During this time, U.S. casualties, armaments and expenditures are at record levels. America’s overseas wars have different outcomes when they have no constitutional authority, no war tax, no draft, no regular on the ground press coverage, no Congressional oversight, no spending accountability and, importantly, no affirmative consent of the governed who are, apart from the military families, hardly noticing." -- Out of Afghanistan by Ralph Nader (Common Dreams 2010-07-31).
Follow the money (if you can): "On July 27, 2010 the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) released an audit of the Department of Defense’s (DOD) management of the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), which was used as a source of money for rebuilding Iraq. The Inspector General found that the DOD used the Fund in an ad hoc manner, never followed the guidelines set up for U.S. agencies involved in reconstruction, which means it can’t account for almost all of its spending, and is probably still using the Fund today even though it has no authority to do so anymore." -- Department Of Defense Didn’t Follow Accounting Rules During Iraq Reconstruction by Joel Wing (Musings on Iraq 2010-07-29). See, also: Audit: US can't account for $8.7B in Iraqi funds by Tarek El-Tablawy and Sinan Salaheddin (AP 2010-07-27).
Wikioverdose: "I know. What's a thousand documents amongst friends? Well, there's your problem. We don't have any friends. Corruption over there is endemic, pandemic and epidemic. Our allies aren't necessarily allied on our side. The fighting is going badly and a halfway decent deep-dish pizza crust remains a concept the Afghanis seem unable or unwilling to embrace. Not to mention Democracy. Unplug the drain and the ring around the tub is we've been there 8 years and things are so not getting better. As a matter of fact you could say the movement more resembles whatever is the opposite of getting better. Don't even mention quagmire. Hah. Hah. We sneer at your quagmire. Our Afghanistan participation makes a quagmire look like a refreshing dip in a spring fed pool with buckets of frosty beer within reach and cold cucumbers slices on our eyelids. Spa spangled bog." -- Spa Spangled Bog by Will Durst (Huffington Post 2010-08-01). A few more tentative thoughts on the Afghanistan wikileaks to hold us until someone does the hard work of sorting through all this raw data: Are the WikiLeaks War Docs Overhyped Old News? by Spencer Ackerman (Danger Room 2010-07-26). And Andy Borowitz: "Russia Disbands Spy Agency; Will Use WikiLeaks Instead."
Always good to know what the next president is thinking: "The tradition that general officers should provide disinterested advice to policymakers based on their best judgments and the most current available intelligence has long since passed. Modern generals first test the wind before they offer an opinion and then carefully tailor their comments to support the prevailing policy. Petraeus, who is regarded as an intellectual and even somewhat of an iconoclast, is no different. His counterinsurgency strategy, far from a new development, is a replay of similar thinking during the Vietnam war and a repudiation of the Powell Doctrine, which asserted that wars should be in the national interest, with attainable objectives, fought using overwhelming force, and incorporating a clear exit strategy. In short, Petraeus is the architect of the counterinsurgency long war combined with nation building strategy that has been embraced by both Presidents Bush and Obama." -- Who Owns General Petraeus? by Philip Giraldi (AntiWar.com 2010-07-29).
This Week's Sermon: "When the First Congress subsequently wrote the Bill of Rights in 1789, one of the main objectives was to confirm that the new republic was anchored first and foremost in religious freedom. It is no wonder, then, that the very first freedom listed in the Bill of Rights is freedom of religion. And religious freedom was given pride of place for a reason: to signal clearly to Americans that gone were the days of living under the thumb of an oppressive regime that dictated religious thought." -- No, America Is NOT a Christian Nation by Richard Albert (Alternet 2010-07-31).
Harlem Nocturne: "The end of an era has been declared repeatedly ever since the death, in December, of Harlem political patriarch Percy Sutton and the political demise of Governor Paterson this winter. Yet the more accurate, and complex, tale is an unfinished one. It starts in 1944, when a brilliant, singular personality, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., became the first person elected to represent a congressional district created to empower central Harlem. By 1970, Powell was sick with cancer and brooding on a Caribbean island, and was knocked off by Charlie Rangel, who has become the consummate Washington insider, steering tens of millions of dollars to the district and making Harlem a force in city elections. Now, though, in an echo of the financial and legal messes that brought down Powell, an ethics investigation has forced Rangel to give up his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee; last week, a congressional panel accused him of multiple ethics violations. Racial politics in New York and nationally have shifted to the point where the machine model that served Rangel so well has grown creaky. No one knows what the new order will look like, but the struggle to define it is under way in the cradle of black politics. The battle isn’t simply to follow Rangel in Congress—the district’s next congressman could as easily be white or Latino as black—but to determine what style of politics will control Harlem in the future: a revitalized, updated clubhouse, a reform movement in the Obama mold, or perhaps something in nobody’s mold, like the freewheeling pioneer who’s the father of Harlem politics." Knocking on Harlem's Door by Chris Smith (New York Magazine 2010-07-24).
It's all Bush's fault: "...we seem to have forgotten how much of a wretched impact [George W. Bush's] years in the Oval Office had and continue to have on this nation and the world. Part of the reason we've managed to forget, of course, is that he's been gone for almost two years now. Under normal circumstances, that tends to put the onus on the current president; Obama has been holding the reins with a Democratically-controlled congress on Capitol Hill for eighteen months, and therefore all eyes tend to fall on him. The problem is that no president in American history has done more damage and screwed us worse than George W. Bush did. In the nearly 3,000 days he spent in office, Bush cut the country to ribbons in ways that have never been seen before, and the impact of that era lingers to this day. The main reason for our forgetfulness, however, can be found on your television and in the pages of your newspaper. The media has completely redacted the impact of the Bush era from their coverage of the Obama administration, a continuing act of deception that I believe is completely deliberate. The entire Bush administration is a lesson in media cowardice and complicity; they rolled over for him for virtually every one of those 3,000 days, and would now like to have us all forget it happened. If as Bush falls in the forest and the media doesn't cover it, did it happen? Certainly, but when the daily grind of the 24-hour news cycle omits the idiot elephant that remains in the room, the narrative of the present becomes skewed and distorted." -- The Missing Piece Meets the Big O by William Rivers Pitt (truthout 2010-07-31).
On the other hand: "I have often said the biggest problem with the Democrats is that we are not tough enough. Now is the time to be tough." -- No More Apologies -- It's Time to Stand Up for Our Convictions by Howard Dean (Huffington Post 2010-07-26).
This week in Crazy: Glenn "Beck has done all he can to scare the hell out of people about the Tides Foundation and 'turn the light of day' onto an organization that actually facilitates non-profit giving. And guess what? Everybody in America would have found out about the Tides Foundation last week if Byron Williams had had his way. He's the right-wing, government-hating, gun-toting nut who strapped on his body armor, stocked a pickup truck with guns and ammo, and set off up the California coast to San Francisco in order to start killing employees at the previously obscure Tides Foundation in hopes of sparking a political revolution. Thankfully, the planned domestic terrorist attack never came to pass because California Highway Patrol officers pulled Williams over for drunk driving on his way to his killing spree. Williams quickly opened fire, wounding two officers during a lengthy shootout. Luckily, Williams wasn't able to act out the ultimate goal of his dark anger -- fueled by the TV news he watched -- about how 'Congress was railroading through all these left-wing agenda items,' as his mother put it. Williams wasn't able to open fire inside the offices of the Tides Foundation, an organization 'nobody knew' about until Glenn Beck started targeting it." -- Beck's incendiary angst is dangerously close to having a body count by Eric Boehlert (Media Matters 2010-07-27).
Backlist: "I am told by people I respect that Barack Obama cannot pull out of both Iraq and Afghanistan without becoming a one-term president. I think that may be true. The charges from various quarters would be toxic—that he was weak, unpatriotic, sacrificing the sacrifices that have been made, betraying our dead, throwing away all former investments in lives and treasure. All that would indeed be brought against him, and he could have little defense in the quarters where such charges would originate." -- A One-Term President?: The Choice by Garry Wills (New York Review of Books 2009-12-03). Nearly a year later, the question remains: shouldn't your willingness to kill people in order to be president automatically disqualify you from holding the office?
It appears that there are no videos of Titus Turner. What a loss.
Health Care: A milestone on the long road to affordable universal medical insurance
Medicare turned 45 this week, not old enough to qualify for benefits, and the DNC celebrated with a little video bloviating. The smug tone is undeserved. Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman believed that they were taking only the first modest step toward affordable universal health care, toward Medicare For All. They never imagined a day would come when the Democratic Party would pat itself on the back for delivering the American people into the clutches of the for-profit insurance industry.
Activism: Think globally. Organize locally.
In the 2008 electoral season, to an unusual degree ordinary people got involved -- contributed cash, manned phone banks, walked precincts and talked to many thousands of their friends and neighbors; they hoped that one candidate would bring positive change to a country that many felt had lost its way. Also in 2008, it was business as usual for others -- the banks, military and security companies, big pharma and big farmers, the corporate elite that had been fleecing the country for 40 odd years. On election day, both got what they wanted, the difference being that for the newly engaged voters election day was an end. For the corporate elite, it was only another season in an endless process of influence, manipulation and outright control of the political system with twin goals: transferring wealth from poor to rich and from public to private. If it wasn't obvious in November 2008 that the election of Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress was a beginning not an end, it is clear now: to beat the corporate elite will require new organizations, untiring labor from thousands of citizens, and profound reform of the electoral mechanisms. Paul Loeb, author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear
, suggests one place to begin.
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of an updated new edition of "Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in Challenging Times;" of "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear" (named the No. 3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association); and of "Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus
." See http://www.soulofacitizen.org. To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.groundwire.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles.
, suggests one place to begin."Soul of a Citizen": Village Politics - Rebuilding Engaged Communities
by Paul Rogat Loeb (Truthout 2010-07-24)
How do we respond to a political landscape where Meg Whitman can spend $80 million on her primary candidacy alone? Or where, aided by the ghastly Citizen's United Supreme Court decision, right-wing groups are pledging over $200 million for the November elections. On-the-ground activism is key; ordinary citizens reaching out to knock on doors, make phone calls, talk to friends, neighbors and coworkers, spread the word through social media, and do everything possible to convince undecided voters and get reluctant supporters to the polls. That's what so many of us did during 2006 and 2008, helping tip the balance in race after race. If voters are dependent on campaign ads and sound bites to make their decisions, the most manipulative politics tends to prevail. If we can reach out broadly enough to talk about the real choices, and reach out beyond the core converted to those who may have vastly different perspectives and experience hand, we can overcome the electronic lies.
If we do this well enough, even with lowered expectations, we'll be in far better shape working to create a more just and sustainable world. If we do it badly, or fail to actually reach out, we'll go backwards. So the next hundred and something days matter immensely.
One way to do this outreach while simultaneously building a base for the future is to work toward engaging those face-to-face communities we're already part of in key issues like climate change or the challenges of creating a just and sustainable economy. This means churches and temples, PTA's, block associations and Rotary Clubs, soccer clubs and softball leagues, the places we work, and all the other ordinary institutions of daily life. Building on the community that they offer, and on our relationships with colleagues, co-workers, and neighbors who already know us, they can provide powerful venues to engage our fellow citizens in our country's most critical issues.
I first saw the power of this approach initiated by a Baptist preacher in Florence, South Carolina named Bill Cusak. Although Bill had never organized anything more controversial than a revival meeting, he became concerned that the Reagan-era nuclear arms race was risking his granddaughter's future. The issue challenged him "like a crowbar to my soul." Bill approached a community college biologist who'd written a letter to the local paper, and they began building an activist community from scratch. They spoke and showed a video on the arms race at every church, PTA, and garden club that would have them. They enlisted a key African American pastor and asked younger church members to enlist their friends.
One of the first groups Bill addressed was the local Rotary Club, where he was a longtime member. "They kind of treated me like I had the plague," he recalled later. But eventually some responded. "Basically," he said, "it takes like to reach like: youth to reach youth; blacks to reach blacks; Catholics to reach Catholics. I even think," he added with a sly smile, "it takes Baptists to reach Baptists." Moving from this issue to others like homelessness, Bill began to change his community.
Granted, some contexts are more intimate and approachable than others. And some have been supplanted by virtual communities, which I'll talk about in a separate essay. But even megacities such as Los Angeles, New York, or Denver are vast patchworks of smaller communities, or potential communities. Every neighborhood, business, fraternal organization, or church group represents a potentially fertile field for public discussion.
When we use these networks to promote humane social visions, we can build on existing bonds of human conviviality and connection, and have the advantage of acting where people know us. As Karl Hess, a former Barry Goldwater speechwriter turned Vietnam War opponent, once wrote, "To carry the message of a cause in a community when you are a generally respected neighbor is far better than when you do it as virtually your sole activity in public."
I saw another example of this in a University of Michigan student group called Greeks for Peace, founded after scattered fraternity and sorority members got involved in peace and justice issues and realized that they weren't the only ones. They organized events that brought critical social issues into the traditionally disengaged domain of Michigan's Greek system. People who otherwise would never have taken an interest began to respond. While these students wouldn't have walked across the quad to hear the exact same speakers discussing these issues, they responded when peers invited them to events held in safe and familiar environments, like the lounge of a major sorority. "So much politics," said one of the founders "is geared for those already involved. We wanted a vehicle for people to be with their friends and learn to take a stand together."
Mobilizing these kinds of villages can give us both the confidence and means to address often overwhelming political and economic problems. The community they provide can also ease the inevitable frustrations of working for social change, helping us endure the endless phone calls, meetings, and other repetitive tasks needed to galvanize people to act.
Most of all, engaging these communities can broaden the stream of those who participate in social change, drawing on common bonds that already exist, and drawing in those previously disengaged. In the wake of the Louisiana oil spill, I think of how surfer (and computer scientist) named Glenn Hening began worrying about the pollution and deterioration of the California beaches near his home. He'd just become a father and wondered whether his daughter would be able to enjoy the beaches when she was older. Glenn was also increasingly angry at the stereotype of surfers as dumb blond party animals "whose total vocabulary consists of 'hang ten,' 'cowabunga,' and 'far out.' He decided to counteract that image by persuading his fellow surfers to "use their skills to protect the marine environment for all of us."
Glenn first talked to surfer friends who were similarly concerned. Their inaugural effort addressed a Malibu lagoon where spillage of polluted water was damaging the shape of the waves on an adjacent beach. The group, now called the Surfrider Foundation, next challenged the dumping of contaminated waste into that same lagoon. Fellow surfers enlisted in droves.
Surfrider went on to win the second-largest Clean Water Act suit in American history, stopping pulp mills from polluting northern California's Humboldt Bay. Members testified at hearings, filed lawsuits, educated schoolchildren about marine ecology, challenged destructive developments, and monitored coastal water pollution levels nationwide. They enlisted swimmers, divers, beachcombers, windsurfers, and sympathetic environmental scientists. The organization now has 50,000 members in chapters throughout the United States, plus affiliates in eighteen other countries on five continents.
Glenn has helped change the culture of his community, in a way that offers lessons for other communities as well. The challenges we face to create a more just and sustainable world remain immense, but because of his efforts and those of his compatriots there's one more group of people ready to try and take them on. "Before we started," said Glenn, "a beach full of surfers would end up being a beach full of trash. We let developers wreck some of the finest surfing areas on the planet. That doesn't happen anymore. By now, the issues we've raised have gained the attention of surfers everywhere. They think about water quality, the impact of development, the need for government agencies to protect the environment. We created a new thread in the weave of what it means to be a surfer."
So what does this mean for November and beyond? We need the kinds of immediate practical outreach that tip elections, but we also need to keep building engaged community, as a base that makes everything else far more possible. If we do enough of both, we have a chance to prevail.
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of an updated new edition of "Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in Challenging Times;" of "The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear" (named the No. 3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association); and of "Generation at the Crossroads: Apathy and Action on the American Campus
." See http://www.soulofacitizen.org. To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.groundwire.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles.
Net Neutrality: There's Still Time to Stop the Corporate Takeover of the Media
It used to be that only the government could really threaten your first amendment rights. Now corporations, with the government's permission and assistance, pose the greatest threat to first amendment rights: that's why net neutrality is the first amendment issue of our time.
Also of interest: He’s no joke: Franken marks anniversary in Senate with confidence (Inforum 2010-07-07).
Also of interest: He’s no joke: Franken marks anniversary in Senate with confidence (Inforum 2010-07-07).
quote unquote: Wilfred Owen On War
Is it "sweet and right to die for your country?"
Dulce et Decorum est
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori. -- Wilfred Owen
Dulce et Decorum estIf in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori. -- Wilfred Owen
Activism: Van Jones says: Don't Mourn, Organize!
The institutions that empowered ordinary people -- urban political machines, labor unions, the Socialist Party, the Catholic Church, ethnic social clubs, independent print media, just recently Acorn -- have been systematically neutralized or destroyed. What will replace them? And how will the be replaced? Can the Democratic Party be wrested from the grip of the corporations? Should we organize electoral efforts around issues -- bringing an end to the war in Afghanistan, for example -- instead of around electing Democrats per se? There are independent parties on the ballots of many states -- socialists, Peace & Freedom, the Green Party, the Liberal Party, and so on; should the Dennis Kucinichs, Lynn Woolseys, Cindy Sheehans, Michael Moores, CodePinks, MoveOns, Tom Haydens, Robert Greenwalds, Jim Hightowers, et al, move to genuinely independent bases of power rather than depend on a compromised executive and corrupt or pusillanimous legislators? Should there be an independent party of the Left? Of Labor? Are independent parties doable without meaningful electoral reform -- instant run-offs, proportional representation, public financing -- as the first step on the road to new political power arrangements?
Saturday Catchup: 2010-07-24
It's Jobs, Stupid: Left to itself, the U.S. economy may not return to its pre-recession rate of unemployment until 2021, says a new study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Even under the more optimistic growth assumptions of the Congressional Budget Office, we’ve got five more years of high unemployment ahead. Not troubling enough? Consider this: millions of jobless Americans means lower wages for those lucky enough to be employed. Median wages rose just 0.8% over the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, failing to keep up with even the low 1.8% rate of inflation. In real, inflation-adjusted terms, that’s a wage drop. “Excess supply in the labor market — 14.6 million Americans were unemployed as of June — has helped keep wage growth in check,” the Wall Street Journal explains. Or, in the more gleeful terms used by a financial analyst quoted by Bloomberg news last month, “Companies are getting higher-productivity employees for the same or lower wage rate they were paying a marginal employee. Not only are employees higher skilled, you have a better skill match. You have a more productive and more adaptive labor force.” That’s great for business – and helps explain the 44% increase in corporate profits this year – but considerably worse news for anyone trying to work for a living. Without more job creation or growing wages, economic recovery doesn’t translate into anything that benefits the vast majority of Americans. So what’s to be done? -- A Decade of High Unemployment and Falling Wages… Or We Could Create Jobs and Help our Cities by Amy Traub (DMIblog 2010-07-22).
Meanwhile, back at the ranch: "It was a branding moment. With their lockstep vote against extending unemployment benefits, the Republicans are indelibly marked as not only heartless but also frivolous in their much-professed concern over the soaring national debt....once again the Republicans seem determined to prove that when it comes to social compassion, they are the worst." -- The Grinches Who Stole Summer by Robert Scheer (Truthdig 2010-07-21).
Not to beat a dead horse, but...It's Jobs, Stupid: "The way to get jobs back is to increase federal spending in the short term in order to make up for the gap left by consumers and businesses (the fastest way to get this money into circulation is by extending unemployment benefits and aiding stranded state and local governments). Over the longer term, we can lift the wages of the vast majority of Americans by expanding and extending the Earned Income Tax Credit -- an income supplement -- up through the middle class, and pay for it by a higher marginal income tax rate on the top. And while we’re at it, exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes, and pay for that by lifting the cap on Social Security taxes on all incomes in excess of $250,000. Beyond that, and over the still longer term, America’s vast middle class and the poor more need to be more productive and innovative, so they can add more value to an increasingly integrated global economy. That means better education. Instead of firing school teachers, closing libraries, and increasing tuitions at public universities, we have to do exactly the opposite." -- Why We Can’t Rely on Foreign Consumers to Rescue American Jobs, and Why the “Jobs for America Summit” is a Bad Joke by Robert Reich (Guernica: a magazine of art & politics 2010-07-21).
It's hard not to think of this as Brother Mose's Teabagger song:
Not To Miss: How could Barack Obama nominate with such confidence a candidate for the Supremes who remains, in conventional terms, a legal and political empty suit? "The very fact that such a person could become dean of the Harvard Law School, Solicitor General of the United States, and now apparently a justice of the Supreme Court, tells us a great deal about how members of the contemporary power elite in America, whether they call themselves 'liberals' or 'conservatives,' see themselves. For Elena Kagan presents a particular kind of blank slate to the world: one that appears to have been the product of, among other things, exquisitely calculated careerism. And that sort of careerism is by necessity always grounded in the relentless pursuit of the approval of the legal and political and economic establishment — something that itself is always inimical to significant legal, political, or economic change. Kagan, in short, is the kind of candidate who is most popular with admirers of the status quo. Indeed, Obama’s nomination of Kagan suggests that, for all his talk of 'change,' he is himself at heart a comfortable denizen of Establishment America – that place where people with the right sorts of resumes rotate profitably between Wall Street, Washington, and the Ivy League, while praising each other for having 'good judgment,' and being 'reasonable' and 'non-partisan.'" -- Elena Kagan, Barack Obama, and the American Establishment by Paul Campos (Lawyers, Gun$ & Money 2010-07-21).
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File this one under #stillmissdennishopperalwayswill:
Weekly war crimes update: A recent report from Amnesty International has confirmed that 35 women and children were killed following the latest US attacks on an alleged al-Qaeda hideout in Yemen. Initially, there were attempts to bury the story, and Yemen officially denied that civilians were killed as a result of the Dec 17 attack on al-Majala in southern Yemen. However, it has been simply impossible to conceal what is now considered the largest loss of life in one single US attack in the country. If the civilian casualties were indeed a miscalculation on the part of the U.S. military, there should no longer be any doubt about the fact that cluster munitions are far too dangerous a weapon to be utilized in war. And they certainly have no place whatsoever in civilian areas. The human casualties are too large to justify." -- Cluster Bombs and Civilian Lives: Efficient Killing, Profits and Human Rights by Ramzy Baroud (truthout 2010-07-24). See, also: New study claims increases in infant mortality and cancer in Fallujah greater than in Hiroshima by Zaid Jilani (Think Progress 2010-07-24).
The Bush and Blair govs knew that the WMDs and Sadam Hussein-Al Queda links were a pack of lies: This week Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former director general of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, their version of the FBI, said Tuesday that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had greatly increased the terrorist threat to Britain and that intelligence available before the Iraq war had not been sufficient to justify the invasion of that country. Ex-Official Says Afghan and Iraq Wars Increased Threats to Britain by Sarah Lyall (New York Times 2010-07-20). The headline speaks for itself; I'm linking it mainly because The Times buried the story.
True heroes are few: "When we create a legion of heroes in our minds, we blind ourselves to evidence of their destructive, sometimes atrocious, behavior. Heroes, after all, don’t commit atrocities. They don’t, for instance, dig bullets out of pregnant women’s bodies in an attempt to cover up deadly mistakes. They don’t fire on a good Samaritan and his two children as he attempts to aid a grievously wounded civilian. Such atrocities and murderous blunders, so common to war’s brutal chaos, produce cognitive dissonance in the minds of many Americans who simply can’t imagine their 'heroes' killing innocents. How much easier it is to see the acts of violence of our troops as necessary, admirable, even noble. By making our military generically heroic, we act to prolong our wars. By seeing war as essentially heroic theater, we esteem it even as we excuse it." -- “Our American Heroes”: Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service with Heroism by William J. Astore (Guernica: a magazine of art & politics 2010-07-23).
Could it be that, somewhere in this nightmarish technological morass, there is something as simple as a delete button?:
"Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space." -- A hidden world, growing beyond control by Dana Priest & William M. Arkin (Washington Post 2010). Also, some perspective from The Nation: Corporate Media Discover Private Spies. In Other News, No WMD in Iraq by Jeremy Scahill (The Nation 2010-07-20).
The Asian Age can use "MNCs" in its headline and, unlike here, the reader knows what they're talking about: "Corporates seek to globalise production but they do not want to globalise justice and rights. The difference in the treatment of Union Carbide and Dow Chemical in the context of Bhopal, and of BP in the context of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico shows how an apartheid is being created. The devaluation of the life of people of the Third World and ecosystems is built into the project of globalisation. Globalisation is leading to the outsourcing of pollution - hazardous substances and technologies - to the Third World. This is at the heart of globalisation - the economies of genocide." -- The Killing Fields of Multi-National Corporations Pesticides, Pollution and the Economies of Genocide by Vandana Shiva (The Asian Age 2010-07-14).
Here's a pull-out from The Asian Age to think about:
quote unquote: “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the less developed countries?” Since wages are low in the Third World, economic costs of pollution arising from increased illness and death are least in the poorest countries. The logic “of relocation of pollutants in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that." -- Obama's chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers, in a memo dated December 12, 1991, to senior staff at the World Bank, where he was chief economist at the time.
Wikireform: We need a People's Project for Societal Reform, a Wikipedia of Change, a think tank for the rest of us....and the internet provides the tools. What's needed is a site with a series of issues open to disinterested creative ideas about all our challenges -- nuclear and other inhumane weapons, global climate change, pollution, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, economic justice, democratization, how to accelerate positive social change... All that's needed is to arrange a voting system where people can see the raw contributions, make comments, and move the best ideas to the forefront without erasing those wild and crazy contributions that might just turn out in the long run to be the most valuable. Best Practices by Winslow Myers (truthout 2010-07-24).
Noam Chomsky catches up with Impractical Proposals: "'It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,' Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. 'The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.'" -- Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This’ by Chris Hedges (Truthdig 2010-07-10).
Hail, hail rock 'n' roll:
When you hear the word "reform," reach for your gun: "Race to the Top" and Arne Duncan's so-called "national turnaround plan" are tied to a $4.3 billion fund to push for charter schools -- schools publicly funded by taxpayers, yet run privately, outside the control of local school boards -- and merit pay schemes where teachers are paid according student test scores -- using eligibility requirements to make states compete for desperately needed education money. The education secretary proposes closing some 5,000 schools across the county and firing entire teaching staffs at schools designated as failing. These national initiatives were first developed by Arne when he was CEO of the Chicago Public Schools for his "Renaissance 2010" program that closed down dozens of schools, predominately in Black neighborhoods, and converted many to charter schools or military academies. At numerous school board meetings and protests, teachers, students and community members warned Duncan that the reckless closing of schools would have dire consequences -- from the loss of cherished neighborhood schools and union teachers to an increase in gang violence. Predictably, these education advocates were proven right. Student achievement stagnated, and deadly violence soared in the schools -- with some 34 deaths and 290 shootings in 2009 as a result of students being transported to schools across gang boundaries. -- Schooling Arne Duncan by Jesse Hagopian (Socialist Worker 2010-07-19 -- Hagopian, a Seattle teacher who lost his job due to budget cuts, is a founding member of the progressive union caucus Social Equality Educators within the Seattle Education Association).
A picture is worth a thousand years: In the age of high-precision cosmology, we realize how very short is the time frame of human civilization in relation to the history of the universe. Within that frame, geneticists are providing us with ever-better maps of early human migration and settlement patterns while art originating from well before Babylon indicates what some of those migratory cultures’ cosmologies might have been like. The symbol-laden anthropological record of the Paleolithic suggests the fruition of a theretofore-nascent neurological potential for artistic and technological expression. The astronomical theories associated with Magdalenian cave art may take a long time (and substantially more evidence) in order to gel, but just considering a celestial dimension to the paintings allows our generation to look with new eyes at one of our oldest shared artistic treasures. Heavenly messages from the depths of prehistory may be encoded on the walls of caves throughout Europe by Holly Capelo (Seed Magazine 2010-07-13).
And, finally, a more benign than usual edition of Those Wacky Republicans - a series:
Meanwhile, back at the ranch: "It was a branding moment. With their lockstep vote against extending unemployment benefits, the Republicans are indelibly marked as not only heartless but also frivolous in their much-professed concern over the soaring national debt....once again the Republicans seem determined to prove that when it comes to social compassion, they are the worst." -- The Grinches Who Stole Summer by Robert Scheer (Truthdig 2010-07-21).
Not to beat a dead horse, but...It's Jobs, Stupid: "The way to get jobs back is to increase federal spending in the short term in order to make up for the gap left by consumers and businesses (the fastest way to get this money into circulation is by extending unemployment benefits and aiding stranded state and local governments). Over the longer term, we can lift the wages of the vast majority of Americans by expanding and extending the Earned Income Tax Credit -- an income supplement -- up through the middle class, and pay for it by a higher marginal income tax rate on the top. And while we’re at it, exempt the first $20,000 of income from payroll taxes, and pay for that by lifting the cap on Social Security taxes on all incomes in excess of $250,000. Beyond that, and over the still longer term, America’s vast middle class and the poor more need to be more productive and innovative, so they can add more value to an increasingly integrated global economy. That means better education. Instead of firing school teachers, closing libraries, and increasing tuitions at public universities, we have to do exactly the opposite." -- Why We Can’t Rely on Foreign Consumers to Rescue American Jobs, and Why the “Jobs for America Summit” is a Bad Joke by Robert Reich (Guernica: a magazine of art & politics 2010-07-21).
It's hard not to think of this as Brother Mose's Teabagger song:
Not To Miss: How could Barack Obama nominate with such confidence a candidate for the Supremes who remains, in conventional terms, a legal and political empty suit? "The very fact that such a person could become dean of the Harvard Law School, Solicitor General of the United States, and now apparently a justice of the Supreme Court, tells us a great deal about how members of the contemporary power elite in America, whether they call themselves 'liberals' or 'conservatives,' see themselves. For Elena Kagan presents a particular kind of blank slate to the world: one that appears to have been the product of, among other things, exquisitely calculated careerism. And that sort of careerism is by necessity always grounded in the relentless pursuit of the approval of the legal and political and economic establishment — something that itself is always inimical to significant legal, political, or economic change. Kagan, in short, is the kind of candidate who is most popular with admirers of the status quo. Indeed, Obama’s nomination of Kagan suggests that, for all his talk of 'change,' he is himself at heart a comfortable denizen of Establishment America – that place where people with the right sorts of resumes rotate profitably between Wall Street, Washington, and the Ivy League, while praising each other for having 'good judgment,' and being 'reasonable' and 'non-partisan.'" -- Elena Kagan, Barack Obama, and the American Establishment by Paul Campos (Lawyers, Gun$ & Money 2010-07-21).
Action: The Investigative Fund incubates in-depth reporting with the potential for social impact. Their work is made possible by support of individuals and institutions committed to a free and independent press. The Fund is a program of The Nation Institute, a 501(c)(3) public foundation, donations to which are tax deductible to the fullest extent provided by law. If you have any questions, or would like other donation options, contact Taya Kitman at (212) 822-0252. Or just give.
File this one under #stillmissdennishopperalwayswill:
Weekly war crimes update: A recent report from Amnesty International has confirmed that 35 women and children were killed following the latest US attacks on an alleged al-Qaeda hideout in Yemen. Initially, there were attempts to bury the story, and Yemen officially denied that civilians were killed as a result of the Dec 17 attack on al-Majala in southern Yemen. However, it has been simply impossible to conceal what is now considered the largest loss of life in one single US attack in the country. If the civilian casualties were indeed a miscalculation on the part of the U.S. military, there should no longer be any doubt about the fact that cluster munitions are far too dangerous a weapon to be utilized in war. And they certainly have no place whatsoever in civilian areas. The human casualties are too large to justify." -- Cluster Bombs and Civilian Lives: Efficient Killing, Profits and Human Rights by Ramzy Baroud (truthout 2010-07-24). See, also: New study claims increases in infant mortality and cancer in Fallujah greater than in Hiroshima by Zaid Jilani (Think Progress 2010-07-24).
The Bush and Blair govs knew that the WMDs and Sadam Hussein-Al Queda links were a pack of lies: This week Baroness Manningham-Buller, the former director general of Britain’s domestic intelligence agency, their version of the FBI, said Tuesday that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had greatly increased the terrorist threat to Britain and that intelligence available before the Iraq war had not been sufficient to justify the invasion of that country. Ex-Official Says Afghan and Iraq Wars Increased Threats to Britain by Sarah Lyall (New York Times 2010-07-20). The headline speaks for itself; I'm linking it mainly because The Times buried the story.
True heroes are few: "When we create a legion of heroes in our minds, we blind ourselves to evidence of their destructive, sometimes atrocious, behavior. Heroes, after all, don’t commit atrocities. They don’t, for instance, dig bullets out of pregnant women’s bodies in an attempt to cover up deadly mistakes. They don’t fire on a good Samaritan and his two children as he attempts to aid a grievously wounded civilian. Such atrocities and murderous blunders, so common to war’s brutal chaos, produce cognitive dissonance in the minds of many Americans who simply can’t imagine their 'heroes' killing innocents. How much easier it is to see the acts of violence of our troops as necessary, admirable, even noble. By making our military generically heroic, we act to prolong our wars. By seeing war as essentially heroic theater, we esteem it even as we excuse it." -- “Our American Heroes”: Why It’s Wrong to Equate Military Service with Heroism by William J. Astore (Guernica: a magazine of art & politics 2010-07-23).
Could it be that, somewhere in this nightmarish technological morass, there is something as simple as a delete button?:
"Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States. An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances. In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space." -- A hidden world, growing beyond control by Dana Priest & William M. Arkin (Washington Post 2010). Also, some perspective from The Nation: Corporate Media Discover Private Spies. In Other News, No WMD in Iraq by Jeremy Scahill (The Nation 2010-07-20).
The Asian Age can use "MNCs" in its headline and, unlike here, the reader knows what they're talking about: "Corporates seek to globalise production but they do not want to globalise justice and rights. The difference in the treatment of Union Carbide and Dow Chemical in the context of Bhopal, and of BP in the context of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico shows how an apartheid is being created. The devaluation of the life of people of the Third World and ecosystems is built into the project of globalisation. Globalisation is leading to the outsourcing of pollution - hazardous substances and technologies - to the Third World. This is at the heart of globalisation - the economies of genocide." -- The Killing Fields of Multi-National Corporations Pesticides, Pollution and the Economies of Genocide by Vandana Shiva (The Asian Age 2010-07-14).
Here's a pull-out from The Asian Age to think about:
quote unquote: “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the less developed countries?” Since wages are low in the Third World, economic costs of pollution arising from increased illness and death are least in the poorest countries. The logic “of relocation of pollutants in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that." -- Obama's chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers, in a memo dated December 12, 1991, to senior staff at the World Bank, where he was chief economist at the time.
Wikireform: We need a People's Project for Societal Reform, a Wikipedia of Change, a think tank for the rest of us....and the internet provides the tools. What's needed is a site with a series of issues open to disinterested creative ideas about all our challenges -- nuclear and other inhumane weapons, global climate change, pollution, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, economic justice, democratization, how to accelerate positive social change... All that's needed is to arrange a voting system where people can see the raw contributions, make comments, and move the best ideas to the forefront without erasing those wild and crazy contributions that might just turn out in the long run to be the most valuable. Best Practices by Winslow Myers (truthout 2010-07-24).
Noam Chomsky catches up with Impractical Proposals: "'It is very similar to late Weimar Germany,' Chomsky told me when I called him at his office in Cambridge, Mass. 'The parallels are striking. There was also tremendous disillusionment with the parliamentary system. The most striking fact about Weimar was not that the Nazis managed to destroy the Social Democrats and the Communists but that the traditional parties, the Conservative and Liberal parties, were hated and disappeared. It left a vacuum which the Nazis very cleverly and intelligently managed to take over.'" -- Noam Chomsky Has ‘Never Seen Anything Like This’ by Chris Hedges (Truthdig 2010-07-10).
Hail, hail rock 'n' roll:
When you hear the word "reform," reach for your gun: "Race to the Top" and Arne Duncan's so-called "national turnaround plan" are tied to a $4.3 billion fund to push for charter schools -- schools publicly funded by taxpayers, yet run privately, outside the control of local school boards -- and merit pay schemes where teachers are paid according student test scores -- using eligibility requirements to make states compete for desperately needed education money. The education secretary proposes closing some 5,000 schools across the county and firing entire teaching staffs at schools designated as failing. These national initiatives were first developed by Arne when he was CEO of the Chicago Public Schools for his "Renaissance 2010" program that closed down dozens of schools, predominately in Black neighborhoods, and converted many to charter schools or military academies. At numerous school board meetings and protests, teachers, students and community members warned Duncan that the reckless closing of schools would have dire consequences -- from the loss of cherished neighborhood schools and union teachers to an increase in gang violence. Predictably, these education advocates were proven right. Student achievement stagnated, and deadly violence soared in the schools -- with some 34 deaths and 290 shootings in 2009 as a result of students being transported to schools across gang boundaries. -- Schooling Arne Duncan by Jesse Hagopian (Socialist Worker 2010-07-19 -- Hagopian, a Seattle teacher who lost his job due to budget cuts, is a founding member of the progressive union caucus Social Equality Educators within the Seattle Education Association).
A picture is worth a thousand years: In the age of high-precision cosmology, we realize how very short is the time frame of human civilization in relation to the history of the universe. Within that frame, geneticists are providing us with ever-better maps of early human migration and settlement patterns while art originating from well before Babylon indicates what some of those migratory cultures’ cosmologies might have been like. The symbol-laden anthropological record of the Paleolithic suggests the fruition of a theretofore-nascent neurological potential for artistic and technological expression. The astronomical theories associated with Magdalenian cave art may take a long time (and substantially more evidence) in order to gel, but just considering a celestial dimension to the paintings allows our generation to look with new eyes at one of our oldest shared artistic treasures. Heavenly messages from the depths of prehistory may be encoded on the walls of caves throughout Europe by Holly Capelo (Seed Magazine 2010-07-13).
And, finally, a more benign than usual edition of Those Wacky Republicans - a series:
quote unquote: WIlliam Dean Howells on American virtue
"What a thing it is to have a country that can't be wrong, but if it is, is right, anyway!" -- William Dean Howells.
Saturday Catchup: 2010-07-17
Shticks and Stones
It's jobs, stupid: Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession. The solution to our fiscal situation is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will require us to control healthcare inflation the way countries with single-payer systems do. So lets talk about balancing the budget. -- Deficits of Mass Destruction by Christopher Hayes (The Nation 2010-07-15).
Where is the guillotine when you need it?: In modern American life, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner stands out as latter-day Talleyrand, amazingly resilient and remarkably lucky -- despite presiding over or being deeply involved in a series of political debacles, he has gone from strength to strength. After at least eight improbably bounce backs, he might seem unassailable. But his latest mistake -- blocking Elizabeth Warren from heading the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- may well prove politically fatal. -- Tim Geithner’s Ninth Political Life by Simon Johnson (The Baseline Scenario 2010-07-15). Also, Elizabeth Warren Should be a Role Model in the Obama Administration Instead of a Pariah by Mark Karlin (BuzzFlash 2010-07-17).
There's plenty of good money to be made/Supplyin' the army with tools of the trade*: "Why is nobody talking about the Afghanistan adventure as a cause of our plunging recession? Or at least citing the 30-year-old endless war as a major contributory factor in wasting our money to 'nation-build' in the Hindu Kush while our own country falls to pieces on food stamps, foreclosures and child poverty -- one in five kids -- that would put the world's poorest nations to shame?" -- America: hooked on war and getting poorer by Clancy Sigal (Guardian UK 2010-07-13). (*Country Joe and the Fish)
Lucky for us, it can't happen here: From Mexico to Peru to the Philippines, armies have learned to portray themselves to beleaguered civilian leaders as the only chance to defeat the security challenges -- so long as the government agrees to the military’s demands for greater funding, more autonomy, and a larger role in politics. -- Military Rule 2.0: Why bother with a coup when there are better ways to take control? by Joshua Kurlantzick and Shelby Leighton (Boston.com 2010-07-11).
Hey, Wait a Minute!: We have a "fairness instinct," thinks Lixing Sun, a professor of biology at Central Washington University. And he may be right. He maintains that high on the roster of human propensities is a "Robin Hood mentality" that characterizes our species and qualifies as one of those "mental modules" that evolutionary psychologists consider part of our likely biological inheritance. If so, our fairness instinct goes far beyond the pleasure we take in romantic tales of medieval Merry Men adventuring in Sherwood Forest. Sun believes that despite the fact of our specieswide social and economic disparities -- perhaps in part because of them -- human beings are endowed (or burdened) with an acute sensitivity to "who is getting how much," in particular a deft attunement to whether anyone else is getting more or less than one's self. -- Biological roots of today's anger by David P. Barash (The Chronicle of Higher Education 2010-07-11).
Megagrammar: "The jumper colon is a paragraphical Red Bull, a rocket-launch of a punctuator, the Usain Bolt of literature. It’s punchy as hell. To believers of short first sentences -- Hemingway? -- it couldn’t get any better. To believers of long-winded sentences that leave you gasping and slightly confused -- Faulkner? -- it also couldn’t get any better. By itself this colon is neither a period nor a non-period… or rather it is a period and it is also a non-period. You choose." -- Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons by Conor J. Dillon (The Millions 2010-07-13).
No room for argument; very little for vermouth: If the news is driving you to drink, at least the libation in question can be the perfect martini: "First a note about substituting ingredients or tools. Don't. This method has been exhaustively tested and retested for excellence and the smallest variation can result in catastrophic and unintended consequences. See the 'butterfly flaps its wings and causes hurricane' metaphor from Chaos Theory. There is room for personal preference and improvisation in many things. This is not one of them. 'Oh, I love Bach's Fourth Brandenburg Concerto, but perhaps it should be just a touch slower.' 'I cropped Caravaggio's Crucifixion of Saint Peter along the top a bit to get rid of some of that icky dark area.' Begin by assembling the following materials and a clean, white towel at your work space. Turn off the television and eliminate other distractions. John Coltrane's First Meditations is appropriate music to work by. I cannot vouch for anything else." -- Perfect by Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners).
The first cut is the deepest: In attempt to reframe the debate over budget priorities, Reps. Barney Frank and Ron Paul have been tag-teaming across the country calling for dramatic cuts in military spending. Basing their critique on “Debt, Deficits and Defense: A Way Forward” (pdf), a study by the bipartisan congressional Sustainable Defense Task Force, they call for cutting the Pentagon’s annual “base”budget by $960 billion over ten years, an average annual reduction of roughly 17 percent below current spending levels. Defense spending accounts for more than half of the federal government’s entire discretionary budget. At a time when virtually every community in the country is facing critical budget shortfalls, defense spending has continued to grow. The Task Force’s report proposes cuts such as reducing the number of deployed nuclear weapons to 1,000 and cutting the number of submarines and missiles which carry them; cutting the total number of active duty members of the Army and Marine Corps to 50,000 below their levels before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; cutting certain weapons programs including the Joint Strike Fighter, the V-22 “Osprey” tilt-rotor aircraft, and the total number of Navy aircraft carriers; and reforming the Pentagon’s health care and compensation systems. Regardless of the impact this or any other letter has on the deficit debate in Congress, the Task Force report insures one important thing: supporters of reduced military spending now have an answer to the question, “how do you cut Pentagon spending without undermining our nation’s security?” At a time when all areas of federal spending should be subject to the budget cutter’s knife, it can no longer be said, even within the mainstream debate, that it’s impossible to identify significant savings in the Pentagon budget. -- Pentagon Spending on the Chopping Block by Christopher Hellman (Yes! Magazine 2010-0715).
Maybe Asian tourists can be enticed to spend money in Billings on cow-tipping expeditions: According to both Montana Sen. Max Baucus and Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, ratifying the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in Congress will be the most important thing our national legislature accomplishes in the next year. In the avenue of international commerce, our political leadership has no goals. They have empty ideals and failed methodology. They ingratiate themselves with organizations like Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in order to forward their own positions, but they provide nothing substantive and lasting to the people they represent. -- APEC and America's Dangerous Free Trade Deception by Craig Harrington (Economy in Crisis 2010-07-16).
Long live rock and roll:
Wanna be friends?: If these supernets continue to thrive and grow, they could fundamentally change the way we share information about the world and transform our notions of friendship and acquaintance. If so, the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace might just turn out to be the harbingers of a sea change in our social evolution, in the same way that the arrival of language transformed our ancestors. -- Why Facebook friends are worth keeping by Richard Fisher (New Scientist 2010-07-15).
Finally, a stupid (but very cold) party trick for a hot summer barbecue:
It's jobs, stupid: Nearly the entire deficit for this year and those projected into the near and medium terms are the result of three things: the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush tax cuts and the recession. The solution to our fiscal situation is: end the wars, allow the tax cuts to expire and restore robust growth. Our long-term structural deficits will require us to control healthcare inflation the way countries with single-payer systems do. So lets talk about balancing the budget. -- Deficits of Mass Destruction by Christopher Hayes (The Nation 2010-07-15).
Where is the guillotine when you need it?: In modern American life, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner stands out as latter-day Talleyrand, amazingly resilient and remarkably lucky -- despite presiding over or being deeply involved in a series of political debacles, he has gone from strength to strength. After at least eight improbably bounce backs, he might seem unassailable. But his latest mistake -- blocking Elizabeth Warren from heading the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau -- may well prove politically fatal. -- Tim Geithner’s Ninth Political Life by Simon Johnson (The Baseline Scenario 2010-07-15). Also, Elizabeth Warren Should be a Role Model in the Obama Administration Instead of a Pariah by Mark Karlin (BuzzFlash 2010-07-17).
There's plenty of good money to be made/Supplyin' the army with tools of the trade*: "Why is nobody talking about the Afghanistan adventure as a cause of our plunging recession? Or at least citing the 30-year-old endless war as a major contributory factor in wasting our money to 'nation-build' in the Hindu Kush while our own country falls to pieces on food stamps, foreclosures and child poverty -- one in five kids -- that would put the world's poorest nations to shame?" -- America: hooked on war and getting poorer by Clancy Sigal (Guardian UK 2010-07-13). (*Country Joe and the Fish)
Lucky for us, it can't happen here: From Mexico to Peru to the Philippines, armies have learned to portray themselves to beleaguered civilian leaders as the only chance to defeat the security challenges -- so long as the government agrees to the military’s demands for greater funding, more autonomy, and a larger role in politics. -- Military Rule 2.0: Why bother with a coup when there are better ways to take control? by Joshua Kurlantzick and Shelby Leighton (Boston.com 2010-07-11).
Hey, Wait a Minute!: We have a "fairness instinct," thinks Lixing Sun, a professor of biology at Central Washington University. And he may be right. He maintains that high on the roster of human propensities is a "Robin Hood mentality" that characterizes our species and qualifies as one of those "mental modules" that evolutionary psychologists consider part of our likely biological inheritance. If so, our fairness instinct goes far beyond the pleasure we take in romantic tales of medieval Merry Men adventuring in Sherwood Forest. Sun believes that despite the fact of our specieswide social and economic disparities -- perhaps in part because of them -- human beings are endowed (or burdened) with an acute sensitivity to "who is getting how much," in particular a deft attunement to whether anyone else is getting more or less than one's self. -- Biological roots of today's anger by David P. Barash (The Chronicle of Higher Education 2010-07-11).
Megagrammar: "The jumper colon is a paragraphical Red Bull, a rocket-launch of a punctuator, the Usain Bolt of literature. It’s punchy as hell. To believers of short first sentences -- Hemingway? -- it couldn’t get any better. To believers of long-winded sentences that leave you gasping and slightly confused -- Faulkner? -- it also couldn’t get any better. By itself this colon is neither a period nor a non-period… or rather it is a period and it is also a non-period. You choose." -- Colonoscopy: It’s Time to Check Your Colons by Conor J. Dillon (The Millions 2010-07-13).
No room for argument; very little for vermouth: If the news is driving you to drink, at least the libation in question can be the perfect martini: "First a note about substituting ingredients or tools. Don't. This method has been exhaustively tested and retested for excellence and the smallest variation can result in catastrophic and unintended consequences. See the 'butterfly flaps its wings and causes hurricane' metaphor from Chaos Theory. There is room for personal preference and improvisation in many things. This is not one of them. 'Oh, I love Bach's Fourth Brandenburg Concerto, but perhaps it should be just a touch slower.' 'I cropped Caravaggio's Crucifixion of Saint Peter along the top a bit to get rid of some of that icky dark area.' Begin by assembling the following materials and a clean, white towel at your work space. Turn off the television and eliminate other distractions. John Coltrane's First Meditations is appropriate music to work by. I cannot vouch for anything else." -- Perfect by Jim Coudal (Coudal Partners).
The first cut is the deepest: In attempt to reframe the debate over budget priorities, Reps. Barney Frank and Ron Paul have been tag-teaming across the country calling for dramatic cuts in military spending. Basing their critique on “Debt, Deficits and Defense: A Way Forward” (pdf), a study by the bipartisan congressional Sustainable Defense Task Force, they call for cutting the Pentagon’s annual “base”budget by $960 billion over ten years, an average annual reduction of roughly 17 percent below current spending levels. Defense spending accounts for more than half of the federal government’s entire discretionary budget. At a time when virtually every community in the country is facing critical budget shortfalls, defense spending has continued to grow. The Task Force’s report proposes cuts such as reducing the number of deployed nuclear weapons to 1,000 and cutting the number of submarines and missiles which carry them; cutting the total number of active duty members of the Army and Marine Corps to 50,000 below their levels before the Iraq and Afghanistan wars; cutting certain weapons programs including the Joint Strike Fighter, the V-22 “Osprey” tilt-rotor aircraft, and the total number of Navy aircraft carriers; and reforming the Pentagon’s health care and compensation systems. Regardless of the impact this or any other letter has on the deficit debate in Congress, the Task Force report insures one important thing: supporters of reduced military spending now have an answer to the question, “how do you cut Pentagon spending without undermining our nation’s security?” At a time when all areas of federal spending should be subject to the budget cutter’s knife, it can no longer be said, even within the mainstream debate, that it’s impossible to identify significant savings in the Pentagon budget. -- Pentagon Spending on the Chopping Block by Christopher Hellman (Yes! Magazine 2010-0715).
Maybe Asian tourists can be enticed to spend money in Billings on cow-tipping expeditions: According to both Montana Sen. Max Baucus and Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, ratifying the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in Congress will be the most important thing our national legislature accomplishes in the next year. In the avenue of international commerce, our political leadership has no goals. They have empty ideals and failed methodology. They ingratiate themselves with organizations like Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in order to forward their own positions, but they provide nothing substantive and lasting to the people they represent. -- APEC and America's Dangerous Free Trade Deception by Craig Harrington (Economy in Crisis 2010-07-16).
Long live rock and roll:
Wanna be friends?: If these supernets continue to thrive and grow, they could fundamentally change the way we share information about the world and transform our notions of friendship and acquaintance. If so, the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace might just turn out to be the harbingers of a sea change in our social evolution, in the same way that the arrival of language transformed our ancestors. -- Why Facebook friends are worth keeping by Richard Fisher (New Scientist 2010-07-15).
Finally, a stupid (but very cold) party trick for a hot summer barbecue:
2010: It's going to be about jobs, jobs and, oh yeah, jobs.
"Total profits of U.S. corporations, as compiled by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, were at $1.50 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2007 and reached $1.59 trillion in the first quarter of 2010. Over that same period, the country lost 8.2 million jobs, or 5.9% of the job base. In other words, about one out of 20 jobs has simply disappeared:" -- Corporate profits have recovered, but job market still depressed by Lawrence Mishel (Economic Policy Institute 2010-07-14).
The mortgage crisis: Time to put the hurt on the big banks
“Our banking institutions are employing the same practices that led to the foreclosure crisis while ignoring borrowers stuck with troubled mortgages and the imminent threat of being thrown out of their homes. Banks continue to take advantage of our most vulnerable communities by refusing to modify mortgages or even respond to loan modification proposals. The action taken by New York City’s Comptroller and labor leaders signifies the need across the country for a dramatic shift in how the banks deal with borrowers. These institutions have the ability to use their offices and resources to finally force the banks to get right and we are encouraged to see this significant first-step.” -- Jon Kest, executive director of New York Communities for Change, a coalition of low- and moderate-income working families fighting for social and economic justice throughout New York State, quoted in Move Your BIG Money by Katrina vanden Heuvel (The Nation 2010-07-15).
Accountability: Torture as policy in the Bush years
The Torture Report, an initiative of the ACLU's National Security Project, aims to give a full account of the Bush administration's torture program, from its improvised origins to the systematized, lawyer-rationalized maltreatment of hundreds of prisoners in U.S. custody around the world. In this video, Glenn Greenwald, one of the Report's expert contributors, and principal author Larry Siems, who directs the Freedom to Write and International Programs at PEN American Center, reflect on the Report and the ongoing struggle for accountability.
The Torture Report: Chapter 1 - Origins -- Creating the space for torture; Chapter 2 - Experimenting With Torture -- Experimenting With Torture; Chapter 3 - Black Sites, Lies, and Videotapes -- Black Sites, Lies, and Videotapes; Chapter 4, Part 1 - A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Scheme; Chapter 4, Part 2 – A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Story Unravels (Jose Padilla); Chapter 4, Part 3 (new) – A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Story Unravels (Binyam Mohammed & Abu Zubaydah).
Chapter 5 will be released next week: Where Are We Now? by Larry Siems (The Torture Report 2010-07-14)
The Torture Report: Chapter 1 - Origins -- Creating the space for torture; Chapter 2 - Experimenting With Torture -- Experimenting With Torture; Chapter 3 - Black Sites, Lies, and Videotapes -- Black Sites, Lies, and Videotapes; Chapter 4, Part 1 - A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Scheme; Chapter 4, Part 2 – A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Story Unravels (Jose Padilla); Chapter 4, Part 3 (new) – A Ponzi Scheme of Torture -- The Story Unravels (Binyam Mohammed & Abu Zubaydah).
Chapter 5 will be released next week: Where Are We Now? by Larry Siems (The Torture Report 2010-07-14)
2010: If the Democrats lose the House, it will be because they have failed to govern.
Unfairly, members of the House of Representatives will pay the price for the White House's failure to lead and the Senate's failure to function.
The party in power is expected to do what's necessary to pass its agenda. If it can't, it is held responsible for the failure, not those who stopped them from doing it. This is particularly true in the present circumstance. The president blaming the "do nothing congress" only works when the congressional majority is of the opposition party. When it's your own party, you just look like a weak leader and people think the underdog Republicans are simply "playing the game" better and so deserve to "win." -- Winning Isn't Everything, It's The Only Thing by digby (Hullabaloo 2010-07-13).
Victories: How a Tiny California Town Sent an International Water Giant Packing
In the fight for water independence, little Felton has become a symbol of what can be achieved
In 2008, weeks after communities all over the United States celebrated the Fourth of July, the tiny town of Felton, Calif., marked its own holiday: Water Independence Day. With barbecue, music, and dancing, residents marked the end of Felton's six-year battle to gain control of its water system. The fight, like the festivities, was a grassroots effort. For when a large, private corporation bought Felton's water utility and immediately raised rates, residents organized, leading what was ultimately a successful campaign for public ownership and inspiring other communities nationwide. -- How Felton, Calif., Achieved Water Independence: Why controlling your water supply is so important by Tara Lohan (YES! Magazine 2010-06-27).
In 2008, weeks after communities all over the United States celebrated the Fourth of July, the tiny town of Felton, Calif., marked its own holiday: Water Independence Day. With barbecue, music, and dancing, residents marked the end of Felton's six-year battle to gain control of its water system. The fight, like the festivities, was a grassroots effort. For when a large, private corporation bought Felton's water utility and immediately raised rates, residents organized, leading what was ultimately a successful campaign for public ownership and inspiring other communities nationwide. -- How Felton, Calif., Achieved Water Independence: Why controlling your water supply is so important by Tara Lohan (YES! Magazine 2010-06-27).
Word to Live By
Don’t.
Don’t like gay marriage? Don’t get one.
Don’t like abortions? Don’t get one.
Don’t like drugs? Don’t do them.
Don’t like sex? Don’t have it.
Don’t like your rights taken away? Don’t take away anybody elses.
From He-Is-She-Is-He.
Health Care Reform: How Do Employers React to A Pay-or-Play Mandate?
Early Evidence from San Francisco Is Positive
In 2006 San Francisco adopted major health reform, becoming the first city to implement a pay-or-play employer health spending mandate. It also created Healthy San Francisco, a “public option” to promote affordable universal access to care. Using the 2008 Bay Area Employer Health Benefits Survey, we find that most employers (75%) had to increase health spending to comply with the law, yet most (64%) are supportive of the law. There is substantial employer demand for the public option, with 21% of firms using Healthy San Francisco for at least some employees, yet there is little evidence of firms dropping existing insurance offerings in the first year after implementation. -- How Do Employers React to A Pay-or-Play Mandate? Early Evidence from San Francisco by Carrie Hoverman Colla, William H. Dow, Arindrajit Dube (NBER Working Paper No. 16179 July 2010).This paper can be purchased on-line in pdf format for $5 for electronic delivery from SSRN.com.
Schools: AFT Leader Outlines Vision to Build Better Public Education System
Saying America's teachers will "lead and propose, not wait and oppose," American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten proffers a plan to "build a system of public education as it ought to be." She argues real changes can be made by focusing on good teaching, creating a curriculum that provides opportunity for students to learn, and sharing responsibility and accountability between teachers, parents and administrators. -- AFT Leader Outlines Vision to Build Better Public Education System by James Parks (AFL-CIO Now Blog 2010-07-09).
The complete text of Weingarten's proposal (pdf).
The complete text of Weingarten's proposal (pdf).
Resource: Media Links
Here are some of the websites that FAIR, the national media watch group, recommends to keep up with the news. FAIR publishes Extra!, a magazine of media criticism, and a weekly radio program, CounterSpin, about "the news behind the headlines."
Alternative News
Mainstream News
Media Criticism and Resources
Alternative News
- AlterNet. Syndicated writings from the alternative press.
- The American Prospect. Liberal political magazine; has a good blog.
- Common Dreams. Breaking news and links to highlights from the day's progressive press.
- CounterPunch. A bi-weekly muckraking newsletter edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.
- Democracy Now!. The web version of the daily radio show.
- Free Speech TV. Towards more democratic television; site features downloadable independent video.
- Eschaton. Popular blog is perhaps the best round-up of the progressive blogosphere, with much media criticism.
- In These Times. A nonprofit political magazine featuring news and analysis that challenge the corporate media.
- Indymedia.org: Independent media organizations and journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage.
- Left Business Observer. Monthly newsletter on economics and politics edited by Doug Henwood.
- The Nation. America's oldest weekly news magazine, featuring political news and commentary.
- OneWorld Online. Global news with a focus on the developing world.
- The Progressive. Political magazine with commentary and news advocating for peace and social justice.
- Raw Story. Alternative news site that highlights stories that get underplayed by the corporate media. It also features some original reporting.
- Sam Smith's Progressive Review. "Washington's Most Unofficial Source."
- Truthout. Independent progressive website with original reporting, analysis as well as articles from around the web.
- WorkingForChange. Left-oriented phone company Credo has a remarkably good roster of columnists.
- World Socialist Web Site. News from a Marxist perspective; frequent media criticism.
- ZNet. Z Magazine's site for progressive news and organizing.
Mainstream News
- BBC World News.
- The Independent. A U.K.-based newspaper.
- Le Monde Diplomatique in English. A French monthly news magazine focusing on global politics (French edition).
- The Los Angeles Times
- The New York Times. Registration required.
- Reuters. British-based news service.
- Salon Magazine
- Slate Magazine. The Washington Post's online magazine.
Includes Today's Papers, a review of national newspapers' front pages. - The Washington Post.
- World Press Review, a monthly magazine offering analyses and English-language translations of the international press.
Media Criticism and Resources
- Abyz News Links. An enormous database of national and local U.S. news publications.
- Adbusters. Examines and parodies advertising culture.
- Center for Investigative Reporting.
- Crooks and Liars. Liberal blog that features video.
- The Daily Howler. An often insightful web-based column on media inaccuracy and arrogance.
- Freedom Forum. Formerly the Gannett Center.
- Index on Censorship. Promotes free expression around the world.
- Institute for Public Accuracy. Seeks to broaden public discourse by gaining media access for those whose perspectives are commonly drowned out.
- Jim Romenesko's MediaNews. Up-to-date media news and gossip. With links to media writers.
- JournalismNet. Online resources for investigative journalists -- search tools and much more.
- Media Bistro. Journalists' site features a daily round-up of media news.
- Media Channel. A media criticism site critical of corporate ownership, with links to articles on media from around the world.
- Media Matters. An organization dedicated to exposing conservative media misinformation.
- Project Censored. Identifies and promotes the most undercovered stories of the year.
- Center for Media and Democracy's PR Watch. Investigates and counters corporate and government spin.
- This Modern World. The weekly cartoon of social and political satire by Tom Tomorrow.
- TomPaine.com. Aims to encourage debate on issues like media, the environment and campaign finance reform.
- Vanderbilt University's TV News Archive. The best free resource for studying TV news.
- world-newspapers.com Exhaustive links to international newspapers online.
Politics: If the people are to win, many old assumptions must be upended.
The Republicans are a coalition between the corporate elite and an array of conservative movements and institutions comprised of the Christian right, nativist, gun rights, white supremacist and anti-choice groups, small government Tea Partiers, corporate front groups and others....The Democrats are a coalition between the same corporate elite and a constellation of non-profits, unions, communities of color and environmental and social reform movements....The presence of a corporate elite that pursues its own collective interests is the invisible planet of our political system. One can discover the existence of an unknown planet by observing its gravitational tug on the orbits of its neighbors. The discovery of such a body decodes the motion of the rest of the system. -- Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: A political ecology of change by Ricardo Levins Morales (ZSpace 2010-07-09).
The Long War: Losing in Afghanistan
Barack Obama is following the footsteps of a predecessor, but they are not Theodore Roosevelt's, as he imagines, but Lyndon Johnson's
by Marjorie Cohn (truthout 2010-07-07)
Last week, the House of Representatives voted 215-210 for $33 billion to fund Barack Obama's troop increase in Afghanistan. But there was considerable opposition to giving the president a blank check. One hundred sixty-two House members supported an amendment that would have tied the funding to a withdrawal timetable. One hundred members voted for another amendment that would have rejected the $33 billion for the 30,000 new troops already on their way to Afghanistan; that amendment would have required that the money be spent to redeploy our troops out of Afghanistan. Democrats voting for the second amendment included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and nine Republicans. Both amendments failed to pass.
The new appropriation is in addition to the $130 billion Congress has already approved for Iraq and Afghanistan this year. And the 2010 Pentagon budget is $693 billion, more than all other discretionary spending programs combined.
Our economic crisis is directly tied to the cost of the war. We are in desperate need of money for education and health care. The $1 million per year it costs to maintain a single soldier in Afghanistan could pay for 20 green jobs.
Not only is the war bankrupting us, it has come at a tragic cost in lives. June was the deadliest month for US troops in Afghanistan. In addition to the 1,149 American soldiers killed in Afghanistan, untold numbers of Afghan civilians have died from the war - untold because the Defense Department refuses to maintain statistics of anyone except US personnel. After all, Donald Rumsfeld quipped in 2005, "death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war."
There are other "depressing" aspects of this war as well. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal reported just days before he got the ax, there is a "resilient and growing insurgency" with high levels of violence and corruption within the Karzai government. McChrystal's remarks were considered "off message" by the White House, which was also irked by the general's criticisms of Obama officials in a Rolling Stone article. McChrystal believes that you can't kill your way out of Afghanistan. "The Russians killed 1 million Afghans and that didn't work."
He and his successor, Gen. David Petraeus, likely disagree on the need to prevent civilian casualties (known as "Civ Cas"). McChrystal instituted some of the most stringent rules of engagement the US military has had in a war zone: "Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force." Commanders cannot fire on buildings or other places if they have reason to believe civilians might be present unless their own forces are in imminent danger of being overrun. And they must end engagements and withdraw rather than risk harming noncombatants. McChrystal knows that for every innocent person you kill, you create new enemies; he calls it "insurgent math." According to The Los Angeles Times, McChrystal "was credited with bringing about a substantial drop in the proportion of civilian casualties suffered at the hands of NATO's International Security Assistance Force and its Afghan allies."
While testifying in Congress before he was confirmed to take McChrystal's place, Petraeus told senators that some US soldiers had complained about the former's rules of engagement aimed at preventing civilian casualties.
According to the Rolling Stone article, Obama capitulated to McChrystal's insistence that more troops were needed in Afghanistan. In his December 1 speech at West Point, the article says, "the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then," the article continued, "without ever using the words 'victory' or 'win,' Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested."
Both Obama and Petraeus no longer speak of "victory" over the Taliban; they both hold open the possibility of settlement with the Taliban. Indeed, Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, chief of operations for McChrystal, told Rolling Stone, "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win."
The majority of Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan. Fareed Zakaria had some harsh words for the war on his CNN show, saying, "the whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate, a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem." Noting that CIA Director Leon Panetta admitted that the number of al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan may be 50 to 100, Zakaria asked, "why are we fighting a major war" there? "Last month alone there were more than 100 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan," he said. "That's more than one allied death for each living Al Qaeda member in the country in just one month." Citing estimates that the war will cost more than $100 billion in 2010 alone, Zakaria observed, "That's a billion dollars for every member of Al Qaeda thought to be living in Afghanistan in one year." He queried, "Why are we investing so much time, energy, and effort when Al Qaeda is so weak?" And Zakaria responded to the argument that we should continue fighting the Taliban because they are allied with al-Qaeda by saying, "this would be like fighting Italy in World War II after Hitler's regime had collapsed and Berlin was in flames just because Italy had been allied with Germany."
There is also division in the Republican ranks over the war. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele made some gutsy comments about the war in Afghanistan, saying it is not winnable and calling it a "war of Obama's choosing." (Even though George W. Bush first invaded Afghanistan, Obama made the escalation of US involvement a centerpiece of his campaign.) Steele said that if Obama is "such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? Everyone who has tried, over 1,000 years of history, has failed." Interestingly, Republicans Lindsey Graham and John McCain slammed Steele and jumped to Obama's defense. Rep. Ron Paul, however, agreed with Steele, saying, "Michael Steele has it right, and Republicans should stick by him."
Obama will likely persist with his failed war. He appears to be stumbling along the same path that Lyndon Johnson followed. Johnson lost his vision for a "Great Society" when he became convinced that his legacy depended on winning the Vietnam War. It appears that Obama has similarly lost his way.
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
by Marjorie Cohn (truthout 2010-07-07)
Last week, the House of Representatives voted 215-210 for $33 billion to fund Barack Obama's troop increase in Afghanistan. But there was considerable opposition to giving the president a blank check. One hundred sixty-two House members supported an amendment that would have tied the funding to a withdrawal timetable. One hundred members voted for another amendment that would have rejected the $33 billion for the 30,000 new troops already on their way to Afghanistan; that amendment would have required that the money be spent to redeploy our troops out of Afghanistan. Democrats voting for the second amendment included House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and nine Republicans. Both amendments failed to pass.
The new appropriation is in addition to the $130 billion Congress has already approved for Iraq and Afghanistan this year. And the 2010 Pentagon budget is $693 billion, more than all other discretionary spending programs combined.
Our economic crisis is directly tied to the cost of the war. We are in desperate need of money for education and health care. The $1 million per year it costs to maintain a single soldier in Afghanistan could pay for 20 green jobs.
Not only is the war bankrupting us, it has come at a tragic cost in lives. June was the deadliest month for US troops in Afghanistan. In addition to the 1,149 American soldiers killed in Afghanistan, untold numbers of Afghan civilians have died from the war - untold because the Defense Department refuses to maintain statistics of anyone except US personnel. After all, Donald Rumsfeld quipped in 2005, "death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war."
There are other "depressing" aspects of this war as well. As Gen. Stanley McChrystal reported just days before he got the ax, there is a "resilient and growing insurgency" with high levels of violence and corruption within the Karzai government. McChrystal's remarks were considered "off message" by the White House, which was also irked by the general's criticisms of Obama officials in a Rolling Stone article. McChrystal believes that you can't kill your way out of Afghanistan. "The Russians killed 1 million Afghans and that didn't work."
He and his successor, Gen. David Petraeus, likely disagree on the need to prevent civilian casualties (known as "Civ Cas"). McChrystal instituted some of the most stringent rules of engagement the US military has had in a war zone: "Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have to defend yourselves with lethal force." Commanders cannot fire on buildings or other places if they have reason to believe civilians might be present unless their own forces are in imminent danger of being overrun. And they must end engagements and withdraw rather than risk harming noncombatants. McChrystal knows that for every innocent person you kill, you create new enemies; he calls it "insurgent math." According to The Los Angeles Times, McChrystal "was credited with bringing about a substantial drop in the proportion of civilian casualties suffered at the hands of NATO's International Security Assistance Force and its Afghan allies."
While testifying in Congress before he was confirmed to take McChrystal's place, Petraeus told senators that some US soldiers had complained about the former's rules of engagement aimed at preventing civilian casualties.
According to the Rolling Stone article, Obama capitulated to McChrystal's insistence that more troops were needed in Afghanistan. In his December 1 speech at West Point, the article says, "the president laid out all the reasons why fighting the war in Afghanistan is a bad idea: It's expensive; we're in an economic crisis; a decade-long commitment would sap American power; Al Qaeda has shifted its base of operations to Pakistan. Then," the article continued, "without ever using the words 'victory' or 'win,' Obama announced that he would send an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, almost as many as McChrystal had requested."
Both Obama and Petraeus no longer speak of "victory" over the Taliban; they both hold open the possibility of settlement with the Taliban. Indeed, Maj. Gen. Bill Mayville, chief of operations for McChrystal, told Rolling Stone, "It's not going to look like a win, smell like a win or taste like a win."
The majority of Americans now oppose the war in Afghanistan. Fareed Zakaria had some harsh words for the war on his CNN show, saying, "the whole enterprise in Afghanistan feels disproportionate, a very expensive solution to what is turning out to be a small but real problem." Noting that CIA Director Leon Panetta admitted that the number of al-Qaeda left in Afghanistan may be 50 to 100, Zakaria asked, "why are we fighting a major war" there? "Last month alone there were more than 100 NATO troops killed in Afghanistan," he said. "That's more than one allied death for each living Al Qaeda member in the country in just one month." Citing estimates that the war will cost more than $100 billion in 2010 alone, Zakaria observed, "That's a billion dollars for every member of Al Qaeda thought to be living in Afghanistan in one year." He queried, "Why are we investing so much time, energy, and effort when Al Qaeda is so weak?" And Zakaria responded to the argument that we should continue fighting the Taliban because they are allied with al-Qaeda by saying, "this would be like fighting Italy in World War II after Hitler's regime had collapsed and Berlin was in flames just because Italy had been allied with Germany."
There is also division in the Republican ranks over the war. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele made some gutsy comments about the war in Afghanistan, saying it is not winnable and calling it a "war of Obama's choosing." (Even though George W. Bush first invaded Afghanistan, Obama made the escalation of US involvement a centerpiece of his campaign.) Steele said that if Obama is "such a student of history, has he not understood that, you know, that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? Everyone who has tried, over 1,000 years of history, has failed." Interestingly, Republicans Lindsey Graham and John McCain slammed Steele and jumped to Obama's defense. Rep. Ron Paul, however, agreed with Steele, saying, "Michael Steele has it right, and Republicans should stick by him."
Obama will likely persist with his failed war. He appears to be stumbling along the same path that Lyndon Johnson followed. Johnson lost his vision for a "Great Society" when he became convinced that his legacy depended on winning the Vietnam War. It appears that Obama has similarly lost his way.
This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
The Internets: A net loss of freedom
That a nebulous complaint by a rightwing thinktanker persuaded an ISP to take down a Spinwatch site sets a disturbing precedent. (Guardian UK 2010-07-06).
That a nebulous complaint by a rightwing thinktanker persuaded an ISP to take down a Spinwatch site sets a disturbing precedent. (Guardian UK 2010-07-06).
Activism: US Social Forum - We Need Unity in Action
Anyone who has done any organizing knows how difficult it is to move the Left from talk to action. Physician, writer and organizer Susan Rosenthal works for social change with International Health Workers for People Over Profit.
by Susan Rosenthal (from her blog)Susan Rosenthal MD is the author of SICK and SICKER: Essays on Class, Health and Health Care. She writes about labor, especially health workers, and social justice at SusanRosenthal.com.
Amazingly diverse. Frustratingly fragmented. The recent US Social Forum showed both of these faces.
Under the banner, “Another World is Possible. Another US is Necessary,” between 10,000 and 15,000 people of all ages, colors, sexual and political persuasions converged on Detroit, June 22 -26.
The shear size of the event was overwhelming, with more than 1,000 workshops to choose from, nearly 50 People’s Movement Assemblies and multiple performances, cultural events and parties.
I attended some useful workshops featuring campaigns to stop cuts to public services and cross-border organizing around issues of common concern. The sharing of information and experiences was inspiring, and many of us exchanged contact information for continuing cooperation.
The goal of the Forum, in the words of the organizers, was to engage in “a political process through which we work to align and strengthen our communities, weaving ourselves into a movement that transcends oppression and opposition, increasing our collective power and resilience.” Unfortunately, when put to the test, these words failed to materialize into action.
On the Friday, I had just left a workshop on building labor-community alliances when I saw a group of medics employed by the Detroit Fire Department demonstrating against cuts to the city’s emergency medical service. The Fire Department and the medics’ rally were both located directly across the street from Cobo Hall, the main venue of the Forum.
I joined the medics and suggested that we bring their bullhorn into Cobo Hall and gather a crowd to swell the rally – it was lunch break and no workshops were in session. To my surprise, we had a difficult time rounding up even a dozen people out of the thousands that heard our appeal for a show of solidarity.
In front of Cobo Hall, I saw a small march being organized behind the banner “Migrant Rights are Human Rights.” I appealed to the people at the front of the march to swing by our corner, stay a minute or two to chant with us, and then proceed on their way. They marched by us but did not stop, missing the opportunity to build support for their cause by supporting someone else’s cause.
My heart sank, as I overheard one of the medics say, “There are 5,000 people over there, why don’t they support us?” Fortunately, we were able to gather a dozen or so enthusiastic supporters who chanted at the top of their lungs. The medics were extremely grateful.
Actions speak louder than words
We could have done much more. The Forum could have featured the medics’ fight by asking them to speak at a workshop, organizing a massive rally outside the Fire Department and collecting thousands of signatures to petition Detroit City Council. Such actions would have brought life to our words.
Capitalism is trying to solve its financial problems by attacking all workers. This attack takes multiple forms: cuts to health, education and social services; attacks on immigrant rights; racist and anti-gay legislation; loss of reproductive rights; foreclosures; police repression; attacks on unions; and attacks on our working conditions.
We can defend our rights only by fighting back as a class. “An injury to one is an injury to all” means that we must treat every battle as our own.
I urge you to support Detroit’s Emergency Medical Service workers by signing their online petition.
If they win, we all win. If we let them go down, we will surely follow.
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